Submitting and approvals
Time you log starts as a draft. Submitting hands it to an approver, who either approves it or sends it back with a reason.
What you can submit
- One entry
- Tick its checkbox and choose Submit selected.
- A day
- Use Submit this day in the day header.
- A week
- Use Submit week in the left rail. This sends every draft in the week, and the button says how many hours that is. When there is nothing left to send it reads Nothing to submit rather than going quiet.
Rejected entries go back with the drafts, so Submit week picks up anything you’ve fixed as well as anything new.
An entry a timer left with an open question — Needs a note or Check this — is real time and stays in your day, but it is counted out of every Submit until you settle it. So a week that submits fewer hours than it shows usually has one of these in it, and the day says which. See Entries a timer flags.
An admin can set Submission period to bi-weekly in Settings → Team defaults. It changes the unit that submitting and approvals work in, so the rail sends a fortnight and the approver sees one. Everything else on this page reads the same.
A submitted entry can be recalled at any point before someone decides on it. Use Recall on the entry row and it returns to draft.
What happens next
- Your entries appear in the queue of every approver on that project, grouped under your name and week.
- Any one of them can decide. Approval is a single step — there are no approval chains.
- Approved entries lock. Rejected entries return to draft with the reason attached, so you can fix and resubmit them.
Entry states
When Jira moves or deletes the issue
Time is logged against an issue, and Jira does not keep issues still. If an issue is moved to another project, every entry on it takes the issue’s new key and, by default, follows it: a submitted entry leaves the old project’s queue and appears in the new project’s, in front of that project’s approver. If a project’s key is changed, entries are renamed with it. An admin can choose to leave already-approved time under the project it was approved in — see Team defaults.
If an issue is deleted, the time logged against it is kept. The key stays on the row but stops being a link, and the row says Deleted issue wherever it appears — the timesheet, the calendar, the approvals queue and any report grouped by issue — rather than sending you to a page that no longer exists. The entry is still yours: a draft can be edited, deleted or submitted, and an approver can still decide on submitted time, because the hours were really worked. A timer running on the issue at the moment it was deleted stops into a flagged draft, so nothing it captured is lost. An admin can instead have unsubmitted time removed automatically; submitted and approved time is always kept.
Jira tells the app about these changes within a few minutes, and usually within seconds. Opening the issue or a timesheet that shows it catches a move the notification missed. Time logged against an issue that was deleted before this version is not marked, since Jira sends no announcement for the past.
If you’re the approver
The Approvals tab opens on Waiting on you, grouped by person and week. Approve all clears someone’s week in one action; tick individual entries and use Approve selected, or decide row by row with the tick and cross. Rejecting asks you for a reason — it’s optional, but it’s the difference between someone fixing the entry and someone resubmitting the same thing.
Two controls change what you’re looking at:
- Group by
- Person is the default, because approving is a decision about someone’s week. Switch to Ticket when the question is about one issue instead — that group spans weeks, and its header says which.
- Filters
- By project, by age (this week, or older than a week), and by outcome — which is how you find something you already approved rather than something waiting.